What is the difference between fritters and pancakes? What’s in a name? A batter of flour, milk, and eggs is common to both, although the flour may be amended by almost any additional starch, such as potato, and enhanced by rising agents such as baking soda or baking powder.

You make a pancake by frying a small amount in a pan to form a thin cake (a cake fried in a pan, aha!), which you can offer a slightly Continental flair by calling it a crêpe.

But it’s still a pancake.

You will typically serve this basic pancake with butter. Sugar. Maple syrup! Distilled fruit juices. You can even fill it up by folding or rolling it around something. Like bananas. Or blueberries. Or. . .Bacon!!

So that’s a pancake. If you dip a filling in the raw batter, then fry it up, voila! You have a fritter. Now this is – of course – more of a guideline then a rule, but you see where we’re going with this. My take, after much observation of fritterists and pancakistas is that:

If there’s more stuff than batter, it’s a fritter. If there’s more batter than stuff, it’s a pancake. Pancakes and fritters have both been around for a very long time – see the recipe snipped below. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we had a bit of a storm here in the Pacific Northwest. It generated nothing like the deadly tidal surges of Hurricane Sandy, I mean nothing, but it was still the largest storm we’ve had in more than 30 years, according to Mr. Salmon, our neighbor and long-term resident of our small beach community just north of Seattle. “Everything that was on one side of my garage was washed to the other side,” he observed, pointing at a garage door broken in by the very high tides generated by a combination of unusually high tide and an unusually strong windstorm.

Our front yard. The Shore Pine made it through the storm!

It was a little wild out there

After spending the day huddling inside from the storm, venturing out only to see if we still had a deck or front yard, we came to our evening meal badly in need of comfort. To us, that means one thing, and one thing only. OK, it might even mean two or three things, but last night we were like hungry lasers, intently focused on Mac and Cheese.